Subject: [homenet] Most simple example "lossy routing" setup / value prop ?

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 11:53:49 -0700

Just following the Babel vs. IS-IS discussion on the side line and have
no opinion one way or the other, so i hope it's not to inciting to
ask candidate consumer question:

Where would i find a simple 2 page user-facing whitepaper explaining
what the minimum topology at home is where babel provides better
user experience over the alternatives, and how exactly the user benefits.
And if this is obvious... why are home router vendors not all over it ?

So far i could only figure that i need alternative paths, if one
alternative path is great working wired, its unlikely to be interesting
to have dynamic alternatives. So maybe i need a bunch of homenet powerline APs
that can talk with each other also via WiFi so i have two potentially fast
but more likely varyingly crappy paths (powerline/wifi). I can see how dynamic
traffic balancing wifi/powrline and multi-hop wifi AP to AP wifi path selection
could be a killer feature killer here, but i have seen no data, and it's
definitely quite advanced. And i am only guessing.  Maybe there is some more
obvious topology i am forgetting. 

If not for home, How much is babel used in the military, oops: "MANET"
enviroments ?  Maybe thats where i could find deployment benefit examples ?

How about comparing to what happens outside the home: Provider are
now offering hybrid DSL+LTE. Is that using any dynamic load distribution
to cope with the variability of LTE ? If this is a case where dynamic
traffic distribution makes sense, how would Babel fare in that setup
compared to what is being done in those DSL+LTE networks today ?

Cheers
    Toerless

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From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 15:04:59 -0400

> compared to what is being done in those DSL+LTE networks today ?

Generally speaking I’m pretty skeptical of these solutions.   We’ve heard about them in homenet and mif.   They try to solve the multihoming problem transparently, with a single prefix, and that makes sense if you don’t have a better option, but it would be nice to solve the problem at the IP layer in a way that doesn’t hide the actual topology of the network.

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From: Juliusz Chroboczek <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 21:18:25 +0200

> user experience over the alternatives, and how exactly the user benefits.

In-charter example: Section 7 of draft-mrw-homenet-rtg-comparison-02:

  https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mrw-homenet-rtg-comparison-02#section-7

Out-of-charter example with formal evaluation:

  http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1747&context=infopapers

(Note that this paper compares Babel, which aims at being a generalist
routing protocol, with dedicated mesh protocols that are presumably
fine-tuned for this kind of topology.)

> why are home router vendors not all over it ?

Home networks currently have a degenerate tree topology (a single NAT box
with two to five connected links), with no path diversity whatsoever, and
hence no optimisation opportunities.  Smart routing protocols will only
become an issue once we have more exciting topologies in home networks.

Yes, I know, chicken and egg.

-- Juliusz

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From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 12:46:15 -0700

>   http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1747&context=infopapers

Thanks for the pointers!

> Yes, I know, chicken and egg.

Well, how about my example ? There is no deployment chicken & egg
problem, right ? Consumers do deploy powerline, APs on powerline are
becoming more popular, so another SSID between the APs as another path
seems to be easily in the grasp of the device vendor, and should help
to much better upsell the product...  And given how i can not buy this,
something is missing here, and i wonder what it is ;-))

Cheers
    Toerless

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From: Juliusz Chroboczek <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 22:05:50 +0200

> There is no deployment chicken & egg problem, right ? Consumers do
> deploy powerline, APs on powerline are becoming more popular, so another
> SSID between the APs as another path seems to be easily in the grasp of
> the device vendor, and should help to much better upsell the product...

Good point.

Unfortunately, babeld (the implementation) does not currently have any
support for detecting PoE -- and since PoE adapters appear to the router
as ordinary Ethernet switches, I'm not sure what can be done about it.

If you have code that detects a PoE adapter and that comes with a license
that I can use, I'm interested.  (Barbara mentioned an IEEE standard that
aims at doing that, but I don't think it's being deployed yet.)

-- Juliusz

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From: "STARK, BARBARA H" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 20:19:29 +0000

> that I can use, I'm interested.  (Barbara mentioned an IEEE standard that aims
> at doing that, but I don't think it's being deployed yet.)

Yes, I'd mentioned IEEE 1905.1a. IEEE 1905 (which includes support for HomePlug AV, but not G.hn) is being deployed some, but I don't know how widely. I'd suggested IETF request a copy via liaison, but no liaison was ever sent. BTW, if such a liaison were to be sent to IEEE 1905 working group before 11 August, I have reason to believe the group would be happy to try to get a copy to IETF.
Barbara